Some Video Notes

If you've used youtube-dl from the command line lately, you may have noticed some breakage when passing a Youtube link to a video player, such as:

mplayer -quiet -framedrop -cache 8192 cache-min 10 $(youtube-dl -gf 18 "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP_-P_BS6KY")

Homie won't play that. It's 'cause lately Youtube has been returning HTTPS links which Mplayer and VLC can't stream. As a temporary fix, youtube-dl's developer added the option "--prefer-insecure" which, when added to the youtube-dl command, will return HTTP links which Mplayer and VLC can play.

mplayer -quiet -framedrop -cache 8192 cache-min 10 $(youtube-dl -gf 18 --prefer-insecure "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP_-P_BS6KY")

Mein developer cautions that this could break at any moment and that he'll look for a more permanent fix in the future. ***UPDATE: This no longer appears to work. OS X users can instead use PPC Media Center, and Linux users can try Mpv.***

This situation (I've upgraded the severity from snafu to situation) can also adversely affect any Greasemonkey scripts you have for link extraction, though in my observation it's hit and miss. Thankfully none of this seems to affect OS X's PPC Media Center, but if you're on Linux or utilizing scripts that have command line args, you'll definitely want to upgrade youtube-dl (youtube-dl -U) and try out the new option.

Also Youtube related, Nathan left a comment on my Some Cross-Platform Flash Alternatives post and mentions Minitube is now available for Debian Jessie and also works on Wheezy by...Well, I'll just let him explain it:

Another Flash alternative you can do is downloading the Debian Testing version of Minitube here: https://packages.debian.org/jessie/minitube . It works perfectly if you install it on Wheezy with dpkg, and then do a "sudo apt-get -f install" to install all the required dependencies. You can then add Minitube to Open With (It's in /usr/bin), and simply right-clicking any link to a YouTube video will open it in Minitube.

Cool!

And one final cool thing, there's a new fork of mplayer2 called mpv. It's available in Jessie, too, though I haven't tried using the above method to get it onto a Wheezy box. I never liked mplayer2 'cause it used a bit more CPU than MPlayer, but mpv seems to have fixed that. Also, G3 users will be happy to know you won't have to compile it with the configuration option "--disable-altivec" to prevent a crash when playing video. Mpv works out of the box, no compiling necessary.

Now let's get back at the productivity Nazis at Lifehacker and watch some frickin' videos at work!